The Celephais PBEM Game

Welcome to the home of the Celephais PBEM Game!

-=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=-

The heat of the summer day settles into a blanket of dusk and the house begins to darken. Outside, children play obscure games, laughing, calling to each other in loud voices, until the night forces them to retreat and their noise is replaced by cricket songs. The air is cool.

The light of the television flickers over the face of the dreamer. He refuses to stir, the remote control loose in his grasp, his face placid in sleep. The bedroom curtains sway over an open window.

The dreamer move deeper into an unreal world that flickers like the forgotten television. He meets phantoms he should know, finds himself in his office building, running late. He's late. Isn't he? The dreamer sips his coffee, checks his watch...

And the dream shifts, flickers.

He's in the hospital, standing before the entrance of the intensive care unit. Nurses pass by, flicker by like phantoms. The dreamer watches the plastic tents that cover each bed flex as the patient underneath takes a breath. In. Out. In.

Which one is his mother's? Which bed?

The dreamer sets his coffee down, rests his briefcase by the door, and moves into the room. The tents swell in unison, then relax. Each breath, in and out. He looks into the plastic, but the shapes underneath are indistinct. This one is not his mother - she never wore that shade of blue. This one is too big.

Which - which was his mother's bed? He doesn't remember her death.

The last tent near the wall flexs - in and out - more rapidly than the others. It is beating with the dreamer's heart. He approaches it and touches its plastic. He can see a figure in a robe inside it.

He doesn't remember her death. He doesn't remember which was her death...

The dreamer wrenches the plastic tent aside and -

Wakes. Air rushes his lungs. He gasps. When he moves to throw of his blanket and wash his face in the bathroom sink, he realizes he is not in his bed. He is holding a quilt he doesn't know, and drops it. He stands up; instead of carpet, a bare wood floor.

He has not woken up in his bedroom. This is some other house, the dreamer manages, running his hands over the walls to find a light switch. There is none. Seeing the room's thin curtains backlit, he stumbles in the dark to them and pulls them back.

The house is on a hill that overlooks a crowded riot of dark roofs, narrow streets, farther away is a pier and then a tranquil bay. The moon crests on quiet waves. A shape is flying in the moonlight, circling down toward the water, a hideous shape...

-=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=-

Nightmare: 1: an evil spirit formerly thought to oppress people during sleep 2: a frightening dream that usu. awakens the sleeper 3: something (as an experience, situation, or object) having the monstrous character of a nightmare or producing a feeling of anxiety or terror

Reality: 1: the quality or state of being real 2 a (1): a real event, entity, or state of affairs (2): the totality of real things and events b: something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily

In Celephais, they are one in the same.

-=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=-

"...some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests, and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder that was ours before we were wise and happy."

- H.P. Lovecraft

-=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=- -=*=-

Celephais is a play by e-mail game based upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically his Dreamlands. The rules used will be a variant of Brett Paul's Bamf system. Play will take place via e-mail, with the moves transferred to a web page for convenience.

To view the events that have taken place in the game thus far, click here.

For more information about how the Celephais characters were created and the system used, click here.